


In the Hands of the Painted People

by Sineala



Category: Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff, Inception (2010), The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon Era, Community: fandom_stocking, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:52:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To learn what the British tribes are planning against Rome, Placidus shares the dreams of a man of the Seal People. He discovers much more than he ever wanted to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Hands of the Painted People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [motetus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/motetus/gifts).



> This is an AU set in Roman Britain in which the Romans have somehow developed dreamsharing technology and they use it to spy on people. *handwaves furiously* Don't poke it too hard; the worldbuilding might fall down. Also I have mixed all the Eagle canons together. Whee. 
> 
> Beta courtesy of osprey_archer and Carmarthen.
> 
> Additional warnings: Story contains the death-in-dreams sort of violence you might expect from Inception fic. I didn't think it was graphic enough to merit an archive warning, but I thought it was worth a mention.

If anything went wrong, thought Placidus, angrily, it was going to be Aper's fault. Aper was an idiot. This he thought as he stood outside the curtain of the room in the cheapest, most flea-ridden inn in Eburacum, straining to hear if the man inside it had fallen asleep yet. Worse, it would be all of Aper's fault, but none of his responsibility; it would be Placidus who had to stand before the legate Marcellus and explain exactly how the plan had gone wrong. And surely something would. They had never done this before, not for real. Six months of practice, of training, and now would be the first time.

"He should be asleep," Aper whispered, across the doorway, his stupid round face pale with tension.

Yes, of course, he should be asleep. There had been enough bribery, enough coin to the innkeeper, to ensure that the drug had been in the Briton's drink. But had he drunk enough of it? Only the gods knew that.

Well, the gods and Vitruvius, Vitruvius who had paid, also, to have it happen that he would be another occupant of the room, Vitruvius who was even now inside and dreaming.

In the room, someone snored. Impatient now, Placidus shoved the curtain aside and moved in, his hand on his dagger in case the snorer had been Vitruvius and not -- oh, what had the Briton's name been? -- Dergdian. That was it. Dergdian the trader from the north, with those stinking oily furs.

But Dergdian was fast asleep, and indeed snoring, sprawled across one of the thin mattresses. Vitruvius was more composed in sleep, curled about himself on another bed. He was dressed in the effeminate fashions of the tribes, long sleeves and all, and he had assured them that Dergdian would never know him for a Roman. Placidus had to trust him on this point. There were no other choices.

"Drink now, sir," Aper said, fumbling with the little glass bottle as he held it out, nearly dropping it. Placidus winced. The stuff was precious enough that they could not waste it. Even worse, what if the cursed Britons found out it existed? They did not worship Morpheus, yet, but they could easily, and their faith would be rewarded. And this trick would only work on the idiot barbarians because no one had done it to them before; Placidus did not flatter himself into thinking he was working with competent men.

So he sat on an empty bed, unstoppered the bottle, and poured it all into his mouth, gagging at the awful bitter taste. It was worse every time, and he wished he could mix it with wine. But he had done this enough to know it would make him slow and drunk in the dream, too free with his words. He could not have that.

"Guard us well, Centurion," he said, as he fell back onto the mattress, his vision already darkening at the edges. He did not even hear Aper reply.

* * *

When he opened his eyes, he was in the dream. He thought he was in the dream, at any rate, for it was not anywhere he had been before in his waking life. The wind whipped past him, brutal, chilling him to the bone. He stood at the edge of a little wooded glen, looking across a barren, mountainous land, grayish brown, strewn with rocks. It was nearly the same color as the awful, cloudy sky.

Vitruvius came up beside him with a soft whisper of footsteps. "Hail, sir."

"You can't mean to say he lives here?" Placidus wrinkled his nose at the landscape.

Vitruvius lifted an eyebrow, all surly annoyance, and Placidus once again remembered how much he hated his orders, and this man. "Well, no, sir," the soldier said, "I cannot say where his home is. He said to the innkeeper that he was of the Epidii, and I have never been to their lands. But this is as far north as I have been, and I think he will recognize it. It is a path they travel by in many tribes."

Placidus glared.

"I did my best, sir," said Vitruvius, uncowed.

He sighed and held out his arms. Time to be a barbarian. He watched the long blue ink-lines spider down his wrists, across the backs of his hands. It was repellant.

There came a discreet cough. "Not that."

Placidus pushed unkempt hair, pale and lime-washed, out of his eyes, and he glared again. "What do you mean, not that?" Oh, this was going to go so poorly. He had only the one form prepared. No one had ever said he would need another one. Not for this. They were all barbarians; what did it matter?

"The Epidii do not look like that, sir."

"Fine," snapped Placidus, acutely aware that in the little room in Eburacum, there was only so long before the trader would begin to wake. "Tell me."

In a short while, he was better, or perhaps even worse -- his face was shaped just the way Vitruvius had told him, and now he was taller, thinner, bare to the waist, wearing disgusting furs, and smeared all over with dark mud. It itched. It was filthy. The first thing he would do when he woke up would be a trip to the baths, oh yes. Even if none of the dirt was real.

"You ought to have some jewelry," Vitruvius said, thoughtfully. "I think perhaps they wear bone--"

"Keep your mind on the landscape," he snarled, and he stalked off out of the trees, to follow the small shape of the trader on the horizon.

It was a dream, of course, so it did not take long to catch up to him.

"Dergdian!" he cried out, grateful that in dreams all languages were as one, and the man whirled around to face him, pleasure writ all across his disgusting mud-streaked features.

"Hail, brother!" said Dergdian. "I had not thought to see you until I reached our village. Truly, you have run a long way to meet me." His eyes narrowed in suspicion and Placidus wanted to punch Vitruvius; he had dreamed up the wrong place after all. Still, Dergdian seemed to think Placidus was someone he knew -- it happened, sometimes, that a man's mind would fill in a familiar face even when they had not known one to pretend to be -- and that was good, that would cover for it.

"Ah, I missed you," Placidus replied, and he struggled not to flinch as the man embraced him.

Dergdian was still smiling. "How is it at home, eh?" And then the smile faded. "Is there ill news? Is that why you have come to me? Did the winter-fever claim your son?"

"No, no," said Placidus, hastily. "All is well. I had only thought to see you before you came home. Can a man not miss his brother?" He hoped as he said it that the man took him for his true brother; thankfully, he did.

"He can, he can." The smile was back. Good.

They walked on in silence, over the cursed uneven ground, up and down one of the little ridges. The view was not any nicer over here. The land was hideous and wild, nothing like calm, beautiful Italia, farmed and settled for centuries. He hated this place. _Egypt_ , he thought. _Egypt for me, if I do this well. Anywhere warm. I don't care. Away from this awful island._

"So," Placidus said, carefully, "how did you fare among the Romans?" This was, after all, what they were here to learn: were the British plotting against them?

A laugh. "It went as it always does. Their wine is sweet, brother, but their tongues are cruel, and they have no wish to trade for our furs. Ah, if they only knew what else we had, eh?" Dergdian cackled. "They would beg on their knees like slaves, would they not?"

Placidus frowned. "What do you mean?"

Dergdian halted abruptly, so suddenly that Placidus skidded in the dirt of the slope, as he hastened to stop. Dergdian's wide, pale eyes blinked a few times, in confusion, and Placidus had the awful feeling that he was supposed to have known whatever it was he had just admitted to being ignorant of.

"The golden god, Liathan!" said Dergdian, his voice bright with disbelief. "Did the fever take your wits away? The eagle-god, the one Grandfather won from the Red Crests. We have only had it these twenty years, after all!" He snorted.

While the man made his little disdainful noises, Placidus was frantically trying to think. An Eagle standard? Immortal gods, how did they have a legion's standard? They could rally the whole north to them with that, every last stinking barbarian. How in the world did they get it? What commander could have been so cowardly as to lose a standard -- and even stranger, what commander had never let anyone know about it?

Twenty years, he thought, suddenly. Twenty years, ah, gods, it had been the Ninth Legion's, the unlucky, rotten Ninth's--

"Well," he managed, with a little smile, aware that he had been silent for far too long, "it will be a grand symbol when we raise swords against the Romans, eh?"

Dergdian was staring at him now in a kind of incredulous disgust. "What is this? The fever made you an idiot, and it made you think we are all idiots as well? No one has said a word about attacking the Romans. And where did you think we got their _short-swords_?"

Too late, Placidus realized that the word, so very Latin, must have come out wrong in the man's mind. "I--"

Dergdian grabbed him, then, by the shoulder, but he did not pull him close in embrace as he had before; he only held him fast, at arm's length, staring intently. Placidus could not wriggle free of his grip. "Who are you?" he asked, his eyes wide in a taut face, fear and anger mixed together. "I swear I thought you were Liathan, my own brother Liathan, but you are not he. You cannot be." His gaze darted around the landscape. "And how am I here? I remember I was in Eburacum. I was in an inn. I had a drink, a strong one, too strong, and there was a queer Roman dressed as a tribesman--" _Vitruvius, you pathetic idiot_ , thought Placidus-- "who helped me to my bed, and then he likewise lay down to sleep. Am I dreaming? Why am I dreaming such a ridiculous dream, of a stranger who wears my brother's face?"

"I am your brother." He had to say it, but he knew now that Dergdian did not believe him.

"You are not," said Dergdian, and the grip on his shoulder was painfully tight. "I know not what this is, but I know what to do about it."

All at once there was an awful fire in his gut, a burning agony, and Placidus looked down to see blood spreading across his belly, flowing out around the hilt of the knife that was now nestled in his stomach. Dergdian twisted it, then dragged the knife out and pushed him hard, until he fell to his knees, adding pain to more pain as he hit the ground. Then Dergdian was gone, running across the hills in great bounding strides.

A gut wound. Placidus stared down at himself and swore. It would take hours to die from that, and it was already hurting so much that he did not think he could dream up a dagger to hold and have it keep its edge.

It was not that he was afraid of death. He had killed himself fifty times, a hundred, practicing this over these long months. He knew how to kill himself quickly, how to open his wrists or the great vein in his thigh, how to aim the point of the dagger at his own heart. Those were the easy ways. The heart was the easiest, of course, if it was him killing himself. He had learned it was hard to slit his own throat, but that one he had practiced on Vitruvius. It was not a nice way to die, but then, Vitruvius was hardly a nice man.

They had to be gone from here now, now that their quarry knew he was being hunted. They could not wait for Placidus to die.

"Vitruvius," he yelled, and Vitruvius was at his side, mercifully, quickly. "Kill me," he breathed.

It had to be soon that Aper would have woken them anyway, but he had been listening for the bawdy marching-song to drift down past the gates into the dream, listening for the man's raspy singing voice, and he had not heard it, only the howl of the wind. Aper would not wake them fast enough, then; awakening was their own task.

"You and then me," said Vitruvius, his face tight with tension.

Placidus hissed as Vitruvius grabbed him by the hair and dragged his head back. "He knows about you."

"He knows about all of us now, Tribune," said Vitruvius, very calmly, and then the blade bit into his throat--

* * *

Aper's face hovering over him was the first thing Placidus saw; it was already unpleasant, and it was yet more so with the taste of the drugs still on his tongue.

"Sir," Aper said, wringing his hands, "I was about to wake you. Dump you right out on the floor--"

"Shut up, Centurion." He was on his feet in an instant, and across the room Vitruvius was shaking his head, groggily, coming awake. "He knows now. We have to get out of here."

"Tribune?" asked Vitruvius, who had to know even more than Aper did how quickly they had to leave; why was the idiot still over there?

"Come on!" 

When Placidus looked up, he saw that Vitruvius had a knife at the sleeping man's throat.

"Do you want him dead? Now would be best, if we're going to."

Yes, but-- no. They had not paid the innkeeper enough to keep that quiet. They would take their chances. Perhaps Dergdian would think it a strange dream, a false dream from the gate of ivory, if the barbarians knew of such things. Placidus only hoped they did not know of the gate of horn.

"Leave it, leave it," he said, and they ran, they ran towards headquarters.

* * *

"Sir," he said to Marcellus, awkwardly. "It was not a complete failure. The Briton may have discovered us -- but he may still think it a false dream. Likely he will, for why should he think it is possible to do what we have done? And at any rate, we know something now that we did not."

"Oh?" The legate raised an eyebrow.

Placidus allowed himself a smile. "There is an Eagle in the hands of the Painted People. I would not like to be the one to fetch it, but it is better that we know of it now. Perhaps we can send a man or two north after it. It would be a mad quest, but then we would have it again, safe once more."

Marcellus made a curious face, and Placidus could not tell whether he approved. Surely he did! It was always best to know what the wretched barbarians had, at the very least. "But what harm is it doing now, in the care of the Epidii?"

"I--" he began, and then stopped as an icy chill passed through him. "Sir, I never named a tribe." Hastily he fumbled for his coin-purse, the one that contained only a single denarius, worn smooth and bare on both sides, the one he'd pressed his own name into when no one had seen him do it. In his palm now it had the head of the divine Hadrian; it was an older coin, one of the ones you saw more often when trading with the Britons in the market. It was not his coin.

"Ah, but I did," said the legate, with a laugh, and when Placidus looked up, it was not the legate. This man was a little younger, a Briton, with long, stringy hair and pale barbarian eyes, and his mouth was curved in a cruel smile. "Roman."

He stepped back to run, back past Aper and Vitruvius, who were paler now, taller. British. How much of it had been true? O gods, what if none of it was? He had dreamed it all. All lies. When had he checked his coin last? He couldn't remember.

The man who wasn't Vitruvius anymore looked at him with cold dark eyes -- set in the very same face Vitruvius had described so nicely, so perfectly, for him to borrow -- and he reached for him with a mud-covered hand, grabbing him, stopping him. The man's other hand held a knife.

Placidus was dreaming, he was held dreaming, but he could not sleep forever. No drugs permitted that. He would wake soon, wake and fight free and run. And, if it was real after all, maybe he could manage to bring the damned Eagle with him.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun with names: Vitruvius was an actual Roman architect. Aper just means "boar," because why not?


End file.
